Newtown reaction: Here are our choices …

How can we talk about the shootings in Connecticut — or Aurora or Columbine or Virginia Tech or an Oregon shopping mall or anywhere else — without getting into an argument?[1]

If you’re pro-gun control and you tell someone that most of the mass murders in America have been carried out with legally-purchased guns and that therefore we’d be a lot better off if they weren’t so easy to get, as likely as not they’ll argue back that there are cities and states with strict gun control laws that suffer higher rates of violent crime than those that don’t. And that anyway, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And that the Second Amendment is a constitutional right and don’t mess with my rights.

On the other hand, if you’re pro-gun ownership and you tell someone we’d be a lot better off if more of us had guns because maybe then, before some nut case can kill a dozen people at a theater in Aurora or more than two dozen at a school in Connecticut, someone packing heat will kill him first, they’ll probably argue back that guns are the problem, not the solution, and point to Great Britain where guns are relatively rare, and so are murders by firearm. And that anyway, when it comes to gun laws, there’s a difference between a pistol or a shotgun in a hunter’s hands, and an assault weapon or a semi-automatic with high capacity ammo clips in a cold-blooded killer’s. And that the Second Amendment was written to enable militias, not mass murderers.

But then, if you’re pro-gun, you’ll argue in response that we have a need, as well as a right, to defend ourselves in our homes, our stores, our theaters, our schools. And that it’s absurd to argue that we should take guns away from law-abiding citizens, because then only the criminals will have guns. To which, if you’re anti-gun, you’ll argue in rebuttal that we have an equally important need, and right, to be safe from guns. And that there’s something absurd about an argument that says more guns would lead to less violence.

You might even argue on the pro-gun side that if deranged madmen like the Connecticut killer didn’t have guns, he might have stabbed the kids with a knife, attacked them with a hatchet, beaten them with a club, blown them up with a bomb. If you’re anti-gun, you’ll turn to the madman in China who, the very same day in a very chilling coincidence, attacked 22 schoolchildren with a knife, which injured all of them, but didn’t kill any.

Do you see where we’re going with this? Nowhere. Politicians and pundits are filling our pages and airwaves and computer screens with arguments for and against gun control. And calling for better detection of mental illness. Yet we’re going nowhere. We can move on to video games, to TV and movies, to the prominence guns get in the news media. Arguably, all of these glorify violence and diminish regard for life and feed ideas to the next potential killer. Yet debates about their role in America’s culture of violence go in the same direction as debates about guns. How do we decide what’s good and what’s not?! Who has the right to decide? It all leads nowhere.

Which leaves us with two choices: avoid the ugly argument by continuing to avoid the subject. Or have it, seek some middle ground, and maybe find a way out. Stripped to the basics, the choice is to do nothing, which ensures the status quo, or do something, which might change it. Which makes more sense?

Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.” He is a frequent contributor to The Denver Post commentary section.